Identity crisis
(No, this isn't a piece on DC comics' latest cross-title arc.)
Early in 2002 I took a piece of information I had about the specific quantity of one comic's order through Diamond (FYI for the non-comics folks, Diamond is for all practical purposes the comics distributor for comics shops in North America), and ran with Diamond's comparitive stats to get a feel for what quantities various comics were selling (again, through Diamond) at the time. This piece, which I called Cracking the Numbers, was a quick exercise and something I posted because, well, I was looking for items to post on that website (since long-abandoned), it was of interest to me, and I knew I wasn't the only comics fan irritated by how the numbers were being played close to the vest by Diamond.
A few months later, an economics student in Europe was working on his master's thesis, came across my piece, and suddenly I'm being referred to as an "economics analyst" in the bibliography and being asked for comments pertaining to themes and logic in the piece. My academic background is in the sciences, with an emphasis on chemistry, with no business or accounting courses of any note to my credit, and while I tried to be helpful I felt out of place.
This is a roundabout way of pointing out how first impressions continue to play out as significant, and how this may even be enhanced by the online environment, where statements take on the illusory weight of print. It's human nature to want to categorize people - to pigeon-hole them. We all do it. It's a necessary organizational skill, but the problem is that we're generally, by nature, inflexible on such matters. We all have a tendency to do the same thing we did as kids, or within families, and peg this person as "the smart one", "the stupid one", "the funny one", etc. It's the sort of thing that sees people in small communities go far with very little gas in the tank, so to speak, or - unfortunately, more often than not - stifle them so much that they don't get a chance to find out who they really are until they go off to college or through a tour of duty in the armed forces. Friends and family, no matter how much we may love them, can be terribly stifling forces. Try to expand one's horizons, and those loving people will so often narrow their eyes because you're trying to pretend to be someone you're not.
Go away from all that into a new environment and some will plummet for lack of a supporting reputation, while others who've been freed of lead weights and a dunce cap will soar.
Online, this labelling happens more rapidly. Meet someone in print on a good day, and it will take a vast wall of subsequent, pinheaded, ungrammatical postings to knock down that first impression of easy, witty intelligence. Meet someone in print on a bad day, and he'll almost have to perform miracles to dig him out of that pit of ill esteem. Meet someone when he's expounding on a narrow subject, and very often that's the strongest association you'll ever have with that person.
While all of the above is something worth keeping in mind as all of us are observers and the observed, it brings me to the issue of blog themes. I don't know about any of you - those of you who are running blogs - but I find myself wondering about what Miraclo Miles is supposed to be about. Despite keeping the header declaration of "Thoughts, selected or sudden, on whatever is of interest when M.J. Norton sits down to write an entry," that doesn't stop people from wanting to categorize it as "news/politics", "comics", etc., especially if they decide to add it to their links.
Similarly, I've found myself becoming too conscious of how I've just posted two or three pieces of a political nature, then added a comment to some comics thread on another site, complete with a link back to here. How far do people scroll down new blogs, especially if they were drawn by interest in a topic that doesn't seem to be evident in the first couple postings? Should I care? Should I be more concerned with keeping my posts terse, as the average web-surfer's eyes glaze over after one or two paragraphs?
I'll welcome all thoughtful comments from blog readers and/or writers.
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